Orpheus
by shadowsinfire
Summary: There's a story a bit like this.  About a girl who died on her wedding day and the one who loved her enough to follow her into the underworld and try to bring her back.  Uryuu, Orihime.  Spoilers for early Hueco Mundo arc.


Title:  
Characters: Ishida Uryuu (Ishida Ryuuken, Ishida Souken and Inoue Orihime)  
Genre: Surreal  
Rating: PG?  
Word count: 518 (and I thought I might only be able to manage a drabble)  
Warnings: stream of conciousness, greek mythology and flower language. And thoughts on Aizen's taste in music.  
Summary: There's a story a bit like this. About a girl who died on her wedding day and the one who loved her enough to follow her into the underworld and try to bring her back.

* * *

There's a story a bit like this, Uryuu thinks vaguely. About a girl who died on her wedding day and the one who loved her enough to follow her into the underworld and try to bring her back. About how he failed.

_I will not fail_.

There are enough differences for him to be only discomfited by the simiilarities, not downright terrified - he is not the one she loves, and the one she does does not love her.

And she is not dead.

(_You'll be the death of me,_ his father said, and Uryuu thinks he was probably right)

He is not dead either, and he is not going to die. He is going to bring her back.

_Their story will have a fairytale ending._

(and he remembers his grandfather reading the old tales to him, and his father standing in the doorway listening and frowning, and an overheard conversation later...)

...princesses in towers and princes on fine horses and dragons and a world where good always wins...

(..._Why do you read him those stories,_ Ryuuken asks and Souken replies, voice too quiet for Uryuu to hear, but he hears his father's response and flinches away from the harsh voice...)

...good doesn't always win, and hasn't that been proved a hundred _athousandamillion_ times over?

(_They aren't real, Souken. The stories aren't real.)_

Cypress for death, marigold for grief, put them together and you get despair...

Orpheus sang so beautifully that the furies cried _and how they must have hated that_, because he's realised recently that when people cry they get angry and the furies are angry anyway aren't they? _Erinyes_, he remembers, the angry_vengeful_furious ones.

_(But later they got called Eumenides,_ his middle school teacher said, _and that means the soothed ones, because Athene calmed their fury-_ but Uryuu looked it up afterwards and found that a better translation is)

the kindly ones

(and that makes no sense at all.)

Plum blossom is _keep your promises_ and cherry is _transience of life_, but no-one puts them together, so they can't mean anything like that, can they?

Orpheus sang so beautifully, but Uryuu cannot sing and has a bow not a lyre, but that's ok because he doesn't think Aizen would like the music anyway (and the strange image makes him snort and the people around him look at him strangely, but that doesn't really matter because tonight he will be in a place where no-one looks at you funny if you laugh, because they're more likely to kill you...)

And he is not breaking his father's promise, and he must keep telling himself that, because he does not like to break his word, and he's sworn to bring the princess back from her tower and if he breaks that promise he will never forgive himself...

...knight in shining armour, but knight sounds so much like night and night is where he is because the sun's been stolen...

And without the sun there's only night forever and ever and everything dies...

(she isn't dead)

(and he isn't either. he must remember that)

And he will not look back.

* * *

Notes: Very quick beta by grass-angel. Theoretically it is possible to play a bow (kind of like a cross between a harp and a violin). With a bow made out of spiritrons it makes spirit music, which is like soul music but more tinkly. And I don't think Aizen would like it.

Wrote the rough draft last night. Rewrote it onto the computer this afternoon. Thoughts? On anything, including Aizen's taste in music.


End file.
